Insert Foot bows to Prince Midnight and Filip Skelecaster.

Richie Faulkner may have some competition.

I wrote about the Judas Priest guitarist being the most metal human being last October, after his aorta exploded Sept. 26 while on stage in St. Louis, playing the very metal “Painkiller.”

As Faulkner’s chest cavity filled with blood from his literally broken heart, he kept playing—including shredding through his solos—before calmly saying “good night” and being rushed off to the hospital for 10 hours of lifesaving surgery. I said that was the most metal thing anyone had ever done ever.

Just for reference … I once hit myself in the face with a drum stick on stage and sobbed through the next three songs. Not metal.

So while I may not be in the top 10 of most metal people on Earth, I did once hang a frozen chicken over my softball team’s dugout as a sacrifice to the rec league softball gods. We lost because, as I found out later, softball gods like their chicken cooked.

I have many years of being a trained observer of musical things, so I understand many people say they’re metal, but very few actually are. Being “metal” is like the Supreme Court’s definition of pornography. You know it when you see it.

Well, I know I saw metal this morning. And its name is Prince Midnight.

Granted, that’s not a very metal name unless you were in a band from Sweden in 1983, back when people (us) thought Krokus videos were edgy. From the photos I’ve seen of Prince Midnight, he also somehow stole George Lynch’s wig, which also isn’t very metal in 2022. And yes, the story is about a year and a half old at this point. I’m late to the game; like I said, I’m not very metal.

But whereas George Lynch had a guitar with a fake skull and bones … Prince Midnight has a guitar made of real bones.

Specifically, his dead uncle’s skeleton is his guitar.

Sorry, Richie. You’re still totally metal. We’ll always have the video of you stoically shredding as your heart exploded and almost killed you. But this guy plays a guitar made of a guy who already died.

Prince Midnight who, of course, is a YouTuber, told Guitar World magazine his Uncle Filip died in the ’90s (like everything bad about the ’90s, I blame Toad the Wet Sprocket). He gave his bod to a local college in Greece for students to study … or throw at each other on Halloween … whatever.

After 20 years, Uncle Filip ended up in a cemetery his family had to pay for. So Prince Midnight did the metal thing and brought them bones home.

“So I got the box of bones from Greece and didn’t know what to do at first – bury them? Cremate them? Put them in the attic? All seemed like poor ways to memorialize someone who got me into heavy metal,” Price Midnight told Guitar World.

So he made his metal uncle into a metal guitar, called the Filip Skelecaster.

I’ve seen a video of him playing his uncle, which looks weird and sounds … not great. Kind of dead, actually. It’s OK.

But this guy and his beloved uncle make metal together. In a really weird sort of way.

Midnight said it “plays fine; you have to strum inside the rib cage, so there are no sweeping chords like Pete Townshend of The Who. You can only strum as wide as the ribs will allow. There’s a certain unexplainable quality to it.”

Well … it’s a dead guy. Which kind of explains it.

“I believe part of my uncle Filip is still there, literally and figuratively. Just a warm presence, maybe enjoying his next life as a totally metal guitar,” Prince Midight told Guitar World. “Now Uncle Filip can shred for all eternity. That’s how he would want it. I’m super proud of the project and how it serves to honor him, his life and his influence on me.”

That’s either super sweet or pretty creepy; maybe both. But it’s definitely as metal as anything we’ve ever heard.

Follow music critic Tony Hicks at Twitter.com/TonyBaloney1967.